This last week I have suffered a severe blow to my daily routine, my iPod packed up. Therefore, I have resorted to listening to music through the iTunes player on my laptop. This has all led me to make an ear-opening discovery in the office. I noticed that I had two people’s names come up on my iTunes sharing function. Don’t quite know how they got there, but it means I can listen to tracks they have downloaded. Though these are not tracks I can download myself, only listen to them.
Illegal downloading and file sharing are now big news these days. Take allofmp3.com, a Russian site that was recently forced to shut up shop by the record industry through the courts, only to open again under a slightly different name. However the odd download company like Napster are now legal.
There is not much than can be done, but the boys at Apple are at least getting smarter with their own services. Now you cannot pass a track and play it without first putting in a password - and you can only do this 5 times - but it also means you have to give your password to someone else before they can play it. And who’s going to do that? Clever!
As a music-loving culture we have never been shy of dubbing cassettes or burning CDs, but when you download an album you don’t get a nice shiny disc, album sleeve or liner notes, which I personally still like. But, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone else.
It is estimated that we now download 1 billion songs a year and yet only 1 in 20 of these are legal.
What is the law able to do about it?
Very little. Just 139 people have been prosecuted in the UK for illegal file-sharing. A mere 10 of those went to court and all them were major uploaders, not recreational users.
The upshot is that no special crack team of illegal download police in black is poised to abseil down the side of your house and burst into your bedroom in the middle of the night.
Still, the legal side of the business, albeit tiny, is still enough for Apple to think it is worthwhile to invest in their company’s future.
For instance, Apple’s online MP3 shop claimed to have sold 1.5 billion songs worldwide. Much of its popularity must be put down to its iconic iPod. 100 million of which have been sold worldwide. Meanwhile, Amazon has announced that it will be setting up a rival site.
When you read statistics like these it is easy to say, “Why go legal? Everybody else is doing it.” But at the end of day it is still plain, good old-fashioned theft. And we are robbing artists and employees of the music industry of an income. We might think that some artists and executives get paid enough, but that really isn’t the point is it?
Now I must fess up here and say I am as guilty as the next man for having copied music, but I am feeling currently challenged in whole area of being totally transparent before God with ALL things, which is subsequently challenging my some of my long-held situational ethics. (Maybe there is hope for me after all)
I think most of us, if we are honest, find the 8th commandment “Thou shalt not steal” a rather tricky one, but why not see it from another angle?
Taken to its fullest conclusion for the Christian, illegal downloading or file-sharing is stealing from God, because the Bible tells us that all good things comes from God and of his own do we give back to Him (to paraphrase 2 Chronicles 11). In this case it is the price of a track we’re not giving back. Small fry, but a principle is a principle is a principle! Well, it is my book and I think it is in Deuteronomy too, I believe.
With illegal downloads there is nothing to go back to anyone and if we want to truly worship God with our lives out of our love and gratitude for Him, it does rather start to make an awkward statement about ourselves, but maybe that’s just me having a particular holy moment. One to work out for ourselves maybe.
Time to press the mute button.
ASD
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